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Foot-pounds are not exactly sane. I can look at MJ/kg and know that it means megajoules per kilogram. Foot-pounds? How many stomps does it take? Oh, you have to multiply by some weird decimal. That makes total sense.

Agreed - way too slow. I worked picking raspberries and boysenberries a few years ago, and if I'd taken 9 seconds per berry I'd have been fired within hours. I'd have been averaging about 50 berries per minute. I'm not sure how many cars per library of congress that is...

Um, no. Size is a factor, but it's not the only factor by any means, nor even the main one. Sun exposure, proximity to the trunk/main stem, number of other fruit on the same plant, and water available also have major effects on the the amount of sugar in each individual fruit.

KentuckyFC writes "Having created quantum superpositions of photons, atoms, and even molecules, scientists are currently preparing to do the same for larger objects — namely viruses. The technique will involve storing a virus in a vacuum and then cooling it to its quantum-mechanical ground state in a microcavity. Zapping the virus with a laser then leaves it in a superposition of its ground state and an excited one. That's no easy task, however. The virus will have to survive the vacuum, behave like a dielectric, and appear transparent to the laser light, which would otherwise tear it apart. Now a group of researchers has worked out that several viruses look capable of surviving the superposition process, including the common flu virus and the tobacco mosaic virus. They point out that after creating the superposition, scientists will be able to perform the Schrodinger's Cat experiment for the first time, which should be fun (but less so for the virus)."

Toe, The writes "Bionanotechnology researcher Babak A Parviz writes about his research toward producing a computer interface in a contact lens. At the moment, they have only embedded a single LED, but they foresee a much more complex interface such as detailed in Vernor Vinge's Rainbows End. Such lenses potentially could also read human bio-information from the eye, providing medical information on the order of what is now taken from blood tests, but on a continuous basis. An example would be monitoring glucose levels for diabetics. The author states that, 'All the basic technologies needed to build functional contact lenses are in place,' and details what refinements and advances will be necessary to bring this technology to reality."